DESCRIPTION: (Taken from the application) A primary goal of the Cell Culture Core is to promote the research of GRASP members by providing a centralized facility for the propagation of cultured cells, uniformly maintained under carefully controlled conditions. The Facility maintains a large number of continuous cell lines of gastrointestinal origin (i.e., Caco2, IEC, T84, HepG2, etc.). The Facility provides cells in dishes, flasks, multi-well plates, slides and filters. Quantities requested by investigators range from one to a maximum of 200 100-mm plates for a single investigator in a given week. Commonly used cell lines are routinely maintained in culture, while less frequently used lines are stored in liquid N2 until needed. The Facility maintains a large number of frozen stocks of all cell lines. Cell lines used have been gathered over the years from a variety of sources including the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), outside investigators, and Facility users. The Facility continues to solicit cell lines not currently in its collection, and will facilitate the procurement of cell lines for GRASP investigators. A unique set of epithelial cell lines from the human biliary tree (produced by D. M. Jefferson) has been placed in the Facility collection for use by its members. These biliary cell lines are not available anywhere except through the GRASP Cell Culture Core.